Remco Evenepoel lost time for a second straight day on an Alpine stage on the Critérium du Dauphiné on Saturday, but the Belgian allrounder preferred to keep a broader perspective on the latest setback.
On a much tougher day of climbing, Evenepoel’s time loss of 1:46 more than doubled his gap of 42 seconds from the previous stage to repeat winner Primož Roglič (Bora-Hansgrohe).
But once dropped seven kilometres from the line, his gutsy insistence on limiting the time gaps for as much as possible once again and digging deep meant that he did not collapse completely, sliding rather than plummetting out of the podium from second overall to sixth.
As the Belgian pointed out afterwards, his overall goal in the Critérium du Dauphiné had been to win the mid-week time trial and then hold on as long as possible in the mountains. That climbing work still needed to be done for the Tour de France was always part of the plan.
Wrapped up well against the unseasonably cold weather that made its appearance at the summit finish of Samoëns 1600, Evenepoel explained that “Finishes like this one, you need to be at 100% to perform. It was a climb with 10% gradients, a climb like that doesn’t lie.”
“Like I said at the beginning of the week, if I get dropped, then I’ll keep pushing to improve my shape and that’s what I did.”
13th at the finish line, the Belgian recognised that it was “A tough day, 4,000 metres of vertical climbing, I didn’t do too badly in terms of the Tour [de France.]”
“For sure, the results are not there, but everybody knows I came here to try to win the TT and then hang on on the climb. That’s what happened today.”
“It’s good to suffer like this, good for my shape, my head and fighting spirit, so nothing strange happened.”
Evenepoel’s emphasis on using the race to hone his climbing form, rather than obsess with a particular GC placing, was notably in the way that he told his teammate and key mountain domestique Mikel Landa to stay with the front group when he was dropped seven kilometres from the line. From that point onwards, for the Belgian the stage turned into a race against himself, rather than the rest of the field.
“I expected this in the morning, in the last valley with 25 kilometres to go, told the team I was not feeling good enough, when I got dropped I’d go on at my own pace. That was the best decision,” he explained.
If there was a sense of deja vu from the day before regarding Evenepoel’s performance, his words to the media effectively echoed his post-stage comments to Het Laatste Nieuws the day before, where he had said regarding Friday’s time loss: “Am I shocked? No, not at all.”
“I knew this and have been saying this for a whole week, but apparently it's not getting through: I’m not here to win the Dauphiné, but to improve."
“It has now become clear that I am not yet good enough to follow the best. I'm here to test my limits.”
Evenepoel nonetheless remains at 2:15 overall and not completely out of the GC fight and the final stage 8 contains 3,700 metres of vertical climbing and a cat.1 ascent to the Plateau des Glieres. Under those circumstances, there will doubtless be diehard Remco fans currently recollecting Evenepoel’s spectacular Pyrenean bounceback in the Vuelta a Espana last September after his disastrous day on the Tourmalet and perhaps dreaming of a parallel performance nine months later.
However, when it came to a rearguard action on Sunday to try and recoup his losses, the Belgian’s concluding words to the media on Saturday made it clear that he’s currently in a very different ballgame.
“The other guys are too strong to take time back. You never know what can happen, but if I felt I had [bad] legs yesterday, today they are even worse. It was a suffer fest again,” Evenepoel said.
“[On Sunday] I’ll hang on for as long as possible, and maybe, hopefully, Ill still end in the top 10. We’ll see what tomorrow brings, but I’m already happy with my TT win and how I try to improve here every day."
